Dream Work

Austria

2002

10 Min

Black and White

2.35:1

None

No Subtitles

Audio in None

Currently 4.1/5 Stars.
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MUSIC Kiswasch Saheb Nassagh

A woman goes to bed, falls asleep, and begins to dream. This dream takes her to a landscape of light and shadow, evoked in a form only possible through classic cinematography.

Dream Work is – after L’Arrivée and Outer Space – the third section of my CinemaScope Trilogy. The formal element binding the trilogy is the specific technique of contact printing, by which found film footage is copied by hand and frame by frame onto unexposed film stock. Through this, I am able, in a literal sense, to realize the central mechanism by which dreams produce meaning, the “dream work,” as Sigmund Freud described it: displacement [Verschiebung] and condensation [Verdichtung]. The new interpertation of the text of the original source material takes place through its “displacement” from its original context and its concurrent “condensation” by means of multiple exposure.

Moreover Dream Work positions itself as an hommage to Man Ray, who, in 1923 with his famous rayographs in La retour á la raison was the first artist to use this technique for filmmaking, exposing the image by shining light through physical objects onto the film stock. —Peter Tscherkassky

Peter Tscherkassky

Born in 1958 in Vienna, Austria. Lived in Berlin 1979-84. Studied philosophy. Doctoral thesis: “Film as Art. Towards a Critical Aesthetics of Cinematography” (1985/86). Founding member of Sixpack Film. Organized several international avant-garde film festivals in Vienna and film tours abroad. Since 1984 numerous publications and lectures on the history and theory of avant-garde film. 1993 and 1994 artistic director of the annual Austrian film festival “Diagonale”. Editor of the book “Peter Kubelka” (1995; with Gabriele Jutz). Films since 1979. Recent book: Alexander Horwath, Michael Loebenstein (Ed.), “Peter Tscherkassky” (germ./engl.; Vienna 2005). —http://www.tscherkassky.at